In the second-to-last term of my study at Raffles, we got the most exciting opportunity. The National Heritage Board (NHB) approached the school for a collaboration: we, the students, would get to design a pop-up exhibition for them, in honour of Singapore's Hawker Culture being inscribed on UNESCO's List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The exhibition would be located in the National Museum of Singapore. Now, at the time, I just couldn't remember if it was the National Museum or National Gallery. I'd been to the National Gallery many times, and we even had a class field trip to go there and learn about how to design a visual identity for an exhibition. This is why all the mockups I designed say National Gallery instead of Museum. Now that that's out of the way, I can talk about the actual design process!
I thought long and hard about what communal dining meant to me. We went on group field trips to the actual hawker centres, all over Singapore, and this is what everybody collectively got from this:
The tables at most of these hawker centres were round.
There's food there.
Yeah.
I think my lecturer Ivan went crazy seeing all the logo designs for three weeks being all different combinations of circles. Now, I'm not saying mine isn't a circle... but at least it's not the main thing, right?
In the end, I decided that to me, hawker culture and communal dining boiled down to one core idea: Sharing. To the diners, this means being able to share a meal with friends and family. Restaurants typically only serve one kind of cuisine, but at a hakwer centre, even if you don't love a certain kind of food, if your friend is craving it, you can get something else. There's something for everyone. You could even try something new, or share your favourite food with someone who's never had it before.
To the hawkers, it means sharing your culture and heritage with others. Singapore is a nation of many different ethnic backgrounds, and everyone brings a little bit of their home to the table. A lot of hawkers stores are family-run businesses too, so recipes get passed down from generation to generation.
Side note: I'm like 99% sure Saint Didier Au Mont D'Or either has the same designer as the NUS Centre For the Arts or... well. Something fishy is going on there for sure.
Aside from the field trips, I also went to the library to find different inspirations for logos.
In the end, I decided to do a wordmark-style logo. When I went to the Nam June Paik Exhibition with my class, I realised that basically none of these had a pictorial logo, or even an abstract one. All of them had a distinct visual identity that used the whole name of the exhibit, because these are all temporary. They aren't like companies, where the goal is to exist
indefinitely. There is no time for the viewer to get used to the logo, so the name must be a part of the visual identity.
I chose these typefaces: Acier BAT Text Outline and Text Noir. They were simple enough, being sans-serif, to be easily legible from any distance. In a museum, where accessibility is so important, this is a big concern, and I think I tackled it fairly well. I also chose Text Outline because the letter O looks like a plate :) It was more obvious in the version where the logo was against a darker background, but it's still fun to know it's there.
Text Noir is so dynamic, and the original has a lot of movement in the positive and negative contrast. Adding colour to it, to represent the variety of food and cultures, was also a fun choice. It was a deliberate choice, too, design-wise, because I had such a problem with the word DINING. It has repeating letters, and it is always hard to make that look appealing. By adding the colours in those spaces, I was able to create a balanced flow between the letters.
Aside from the wordmark, I added the element of hands. This goes back to the original idea of Sharing. Hands are all about interaction, whether it's with the food or with others. It's also a way to show the range of cuisines, cultures, and people, without explicitly showing a particular one. Instead of showing the food itself, I can show the tools that people use to interact with food. I didn't show any faces, and this makes it easier for the viewers to see themselves in the characters.
Where at first I used the logo against an orange background and it worked okay, once I added the hands, my lecturer advised that I use a white background instead. With all the colour and detail, it would stand out better.
This goes back to the circle thing. Instead of explicitly using it as a logo, it's still here as an element, but as a frame for everything else. That way, it alludes to the iconic circular table, but is more subtle.
I took this photo at the National Gallery, and made a mockup of it. I'm pretty proud of this one, because no one else had one like it, and it really shows how it could be applied in real life.
Another way that the illustrations could be used would be within the informational booklet provided by the museum. Some processes (like butchering a chicken, for example) might be unappealing to look at, but using cartoonish illustrations would change that.
We were also tasked to come up with merchandise, as they had a potential collaboration with Museum Label and Supermama, two product design/lifestyle/gift companies. After looking at their product lines, I designed these.
I really thought about what kind of gifts might sell, and for that I thought about what I might buy. I didn't want to just slap the logo and key visual all over the merchandise; I wanted to create something desirable.
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